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Responsibilities: As a PhD student you will participate in one of two research projects on how non-native listeners learn and process reduced pronunciation variants that are highly frequent in spontaneous speech (e.g. English mis instead of mist). One project is funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council, other by a VICI Grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Both projects are directed by Professor Mirjam Ernestus. You will write at least three papers on the basis of this research for high-impact international journals.

General descriptions of the project: The ERC and VICI projects investigate in detail how adult learners of a foreign language develop and use lexical representations for reduced pronunciation variants and how their listening skills can be improved. The projects aim at providing a first theory of how listeners learn to understand words in conversational speech in a foreign language.

PhD project E1 will investigate the nature of lexical representations that advanced late learners have developed for reduced variants in their foreign language, how they use these representations, and how this can be improved. It will study how native speakers of Dutch process vowel devoicing and categorical deletion of schwa in French.

PhD project E2 will investigate advanced late learners' sensitivities to subtle details of speech signals which act as cues to reduced sounds and how their comprehension of words can be improved with these subtle cues. It will study how native speakers of Spanish process gradient reduction of schwa and of word-final consonant clusters in English.

PhD project V1 will investigate how starting learners store phonetic details of reduced pronunciation variants in their lexical representations, how these representations develop over time, and the role of the native language therein. It will study how Dutch and Spanish young adults learn pronunciation variants with reduced vowels in English and French.

Work environment: Radboud University Nijmegen is strategically located in Europe and is one of the leading academic communities in the Netherlands. Established in 1923 and situated in the oldest city of the Netherlands, it has nine faculties and enrolls over 17,500 students in 107 study programmes.

The Faculty of Arts consists of ten departments in the areas of language and culture, history of arts, linguistics and business communication, which together cater for about 2,700 students and collaborate closely in teaching and research. Research at the Faculty of Arts is embedded in two research institutes: the institute for Historical, Literary and Cultural Studies (HCLS) and the Centre for Language Studies (CLS).

What we expect from you: - You should have, or shortly expect to obtain an MSc degree in an area related to speech processing: such as psychology, cognitive neurosciences, phonetics, or linguistics; - You should have an excellent written and spoken command of English and demonstrable knowledge of data analysis; - You should be able to quickly learn new research methods and data analysis methods.

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